1. Field of the Disclosure
The present invention relates generally to wireless communication, and more particularly to a system and method for protecting video streams transmitted over a wireless medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless video streaming applications are becoming increasingly common. In particular, video streaming over 802.11 (WLAN) wireless networks, including simultaneous streaming of multiple video feeds to different client devices, has become more commonplace. Video streaming tends to have stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, especially in terms of packet loss rate, jitter, and latency. These QoS requirements mean that video streaming over a wireless medium demands a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth in order to be successful. The dynamic nature of a shared wireless medium presents challenges to consistently providing this dedicated bandwidth to video streams.
For example, although a wireless network may initially be able to support multiple video streams, changing medium conditions may create a situation in which net available bandwidth is not sufficient for all of the video streams which were initially supported. In this case, all of the video streams may be negatively impacted, potentially including glitches on all of the video streams, which of course may present a severe negative impact on the video quality and user experience. Accordingly, improvements in the field would be desirable.